Towns in Big Storms' Path Still Winded

By John-Thor Dahlburg

May 30, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

FROSTPROOF, Fla. — A blue tarp still covers the tattered roof of the wood-frame home that was lashed by not one but three hurricanes last year. When 62-year-old Bobby Curtis, who has had two open-heart surgeries, feels up to it, he whittles away at the downed tree in the backyard, leaning on his cane as he wields a chain saw.

“We’ve got to get shingles,” says his wife, Nell, 66, “we’ve got to get a roof and we’ve got to cut up the tree.”

So are the Curtises, retirees from the local orange-processing plant, ready to face yet another hurricane season?

The Alabama-born woman laughs merrily. “Oh no,” she says. “We ain’t even through with last year’s storms.”

With the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season only two days away, tens of thousands of Floridians are still trying to cope with the consequences of 2004, when four hurricanes within six weeks -- Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne -- slammed into their state.

The hurricanes caused 123 deaths in Florida and more than $42 billion in property damage, much of which has not been fixed.

“You still fly over parts of Florida and see blue tarps, roofs that have not been repaired yet,” said Craig Fugate, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. More than 10,000 families who lost their homes in the 2004 storms remain in temporary housing, he said.

“As we get ready for this hurricane season, they are in travel trailers, mobile homes they are going to have to evacuate” in the event of a hurricane, Fugate said in an interview in Tampa.

Perhaps no municipality in Florida was affected as broadly by the 2004 hurricanes as Frostproof, a pretty town of 3,000 nestled between lakes in central Florida’s citrus belt, midway between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. The eye of Charley came within 10 miles, the outer wall of Frances’ eye passed through town, and the center of Jeanne scored a direct hit.

No one was killed. But according to Stella C. Heath, who took over as acting city manager when the incumbent resigned between storms to take a job elsewhere, public and private property worth $43 million was destroyed or damaged.

“In a place of a little over 2 1/2 square miles,” Heath said, “that’s a lot of damage.”

Nine months after Charley, the first and most powerful of the 2004 hurricanes, more than 1,000 homes in and around Frostproof still had plastic protecting their roofs from wind and rain, she said. One, a single-story house painted white and brown, belonged to the Curtises.

“We tried, we didn’t get any help,” said Nell Curtis. “Insurance didn’t cover the roof. We have to take care of that ourselves.” Contractors wanted at least $7,000 to remove the downed tree, “but we can’t afford that,” she said. So Bobby Curtis, who has three plastic valves in his heart, hacks away at the mass of branches and foliage when he feels well.

“He don’t give up,” his wife said. “He keeps plugging.”

These days, Frostproof’s public works department operates out of a storage shed in a citrus grove because its building imploded in Charley’s 115-mph winds. The American Legion post has been condemned. The Police Department’s building might also need to be condemned, Heath said, but it remains in use.

“They have nowhere else to work,” she said.

Such resilience, she said, was typical of how people in Frostproof have dealt with the legacy of three hurricanes.

After Charley, the mayor resigned, blaming storm-induced stress for bringing on a heart attack. The police chief wanted to retire, but Heath persuaded him to stay until the 2004 hurricane season was over.

Paying for the cleanup, repairs and rebuilding had left the municipal coffers perilously low, said Damon Nicholson, 38, a paramedic who was elected mayor a month ago by the City Council. The town was counting on a check for about $400,000 from the federal government to replenish its emergency fund in time for any hurricanes this year, he said.

“A lot of people are not looking forward to this hurricane season, especially after the high number of predictions,” Nicholson said.

The coming season could be another punishing one. Government researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have forecast seven to nine Atlantic hurricanes in 2005, with three to five likely to become major storms with winds above 110 mph. Two or three hurricanes were expected to hit somewhere in the United States, the meteorologists said.

The unrelenting tropical storms of last August and September did have one clear benefit. “We learned a lot of lessons,” Gov. Jeb Bush said during a statewide conference on hurricanes this month in Tampa. “We are already beginning to adopt better practices as we prepare for this year.”

To encourage Floridians to be ready, the governor last week approved the state’s first sales-tax holiday on emergency supplies, including flashlights, generators and ice chests. The 12-day reprieve from state and local sales taxes begins Wednesday, the first day of the 2005 Atlantic storm season, which continues through November.

However, despite the well-publicized repeated maulings administered by last year’s hurricanes, a survey published this month by an independent polling firm found that 47% of coastal residents from Texas to Maine -- Florida included -- had no plan to deal with a serious hurricane that threatened their home.

“There are still too many people in Florida in denial, [believing] that what happened last year is a fluke and it won’t happen again,” said Fugate, the emergency management official.

In Frostproof, the Rev. Jerry F. Phillips, a former Navy chaplain who is pastor at the First United Methodist Church, has been using his pulpit to preach preparedness. “God has given us common sense,” the clergyman said. “We shouldn’t assume God will take care of us because we’re Christians.”

In last year’s hurricanes, Phillips’ church sustained $800,000 in wind and water damage, the pastor said, and the congregation had to meet in a funeral home for eight weeks. Most of the damage has been repaired, but the stained-glass windows still leak.

“In a lot of communities, the scars are still visible,” Fugate said. “And they are going to be visible for years. There are still a lot of schools and fire stations and places like that that are going to have to be rebuilt.”

In the Florida Panhandle this month, cleanup teams were still removing trees, roofs and other debris that Ivan dumped on Pensacola-area beaches. Only three of the 12 motels on Pensacola Beach had reopened. More than 2,500 residents were still in temporary housing. The Interstate 10 bridge that collapsed into Escambia Bay had been temporarily repaired, but only three lanes were open and the speed limit was 40 mph. Construction of a $243-million, hurricane-proof bridge was expected to take more than two years.

Janice Kilgore, public safety director with Escambia County Emergency Management, said many people were still making repairs. “We haven’t had enough time to recover from Ivan, but we are as prepared as we can be.”

In Charlotte County on the Gulf of Mexico, where Charley made landfall, many people still had travel trailers in their front yards and were waiting for their roofs to be fixed. In Punta Gorda, residents occupied 551 mobile home units. Jerry Mallet, the county emergency coordinator, estimated that it could take the county as long as 10 years to recover fully.

In St. Lucie County on the eastern coast, hit head-on when Frances and Jeanne rumbled in from the Atlantic, more than 2,000 people were living in trailers and RVs provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A shelter for people with special needs, wiped out by the 2004 storms, was supposed to reopen next month. A 13-mile evacuation route along the Indian River Lagoon that was destroyed was still being rebuilt.

“We’re still in recovery mode,” said Tom Christopher, a county emergency planner. “But we’re prepared for this year’s storms.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Weather-beaten

The four hurricanes that hit Florida within six weeks in 2004 caused 123 deaths and more than $42 billion in property damage in the state. The town of Frostproof, population 3,000, suffered damage from hurricanes Charley and Frances and then a direct hit by Hurricane Jeanne.

Confirmed deaths in Florida

Charley: 35

Frances: 40

Ivan: 29

Jeanne: 19

Total: 123

Florida assistance cases*

Charley: 116,278

Frances: 229,092

Ivan: 79,194

Jeanne: 180,343

Total: 604,907